Polish Refugees Remember Mexico's Warm Embrace

August 12, 1996|By Melita Marie Garza, Tribune Staff Writer.

Chester Sawko arrived in North America in July 1943 and within days learned those words important to a child in any language.

"Lend me your bicycle!" the 13-year-old Polish refugee shouted in Spanish at the curious Mexicans who rode their bikes up to the fence of the temporary safe haven that had been set up for refugee families at Colonia Santa Rosa in Leon, Guanajuato, Mexico.

Sawko, now 66, and the president of his suburban Chicago manufacturing firm, never has forgotten the kindness of the Mexican people who obligingly let the refugee kids ride their bikes, even though most didn't know how.

"It was a real novelty for us because we never had any toys," said Sawko, whose family members were among 1.7 million Poles uprooted by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and shipped on cattle cars to labor camps in Siberia during World War II when the Soviet Union and Germany divided Poland.

After three years in Mexico, Sawko and his family resettled permanently in Chicago, sponsored by two uncles living in Chicago. Dozens of other refugee families and orphans from Colonia Santa Rosa had no homes or relatives to return to in Poland and also eventually were resettled in Chicago, as well as Milwaukee, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Cambridge Springs, Pa.

This weekend about 500 surviving refugees and their families dined on red borscht, a traditional Polish beet soup, and liver pate rolls at the Starlight Inn Ballroom.

But no one lifted a spoon until the entire group, whose members journeyed from Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, Poland and throughout the U.S. for the 50th anniversary of the refugeees' arrival to the U.S., stood up and sang three national anthems, that of the U.S., Poland and Mexico.

"Mexico was our way station to what became the promised land--our new homes in the U.S.," Rev. Ted Pracz, a Santa Rosa refugee who now has a parish in Danville, Ill., said at a thanksgiving mass celebrated Sunday at the Felician Sisters Chapel in Chicago.

"Mexico was the first place we felt at home, where we realized we were still part of the human race," said Thaddeus Piezcko, 63, who was 15 when he was resettled in Chicago at the now-shuttered St. Hedwig's orphanage.

The journey to Mexico was a long one for the refugees, beginning Sept. 17, 1939, when the Soviet Union invaded and occupied part of Poland, then a few months later began mass deportations mostly from the northeastern half of Poland.

Each family has its own story, but they all begin like Sawko's, with Soviet soldiers banging on the door in the middle of a cold, snowy February night in 1940.

The family was given 30 minutes to pack what belongings and food they could carry on a wooden sleigh. Sawko's father, a forest ranger, was arrested. Sawko's mother, then 35 and pregnant, was crying.

An older brother, Stanley, then 16, was allowed to stay and care for a sister, 14, in the hospital. But Sawko and his three younger brothers were forced onto the sleigh with their parents and driven to a city where they were put in a crowded railroad car for a four-week trip to the Soviet border.

"It was unbelievable," Sawko said. "You had no facilities. No place to bathe. Grown men would jump off the train when it stopped and scoop up snow to melt on the wood-burning stove in the center of the car."

The journey began even more tragically for Ana Szkutnik de Cabrero, now 68 and a Mexican resident.

"We were aroused out of bed in our nightclothes and taken away dressed like that," said Szkutnik de Cabrero, who was just 11-year-old Ana Szkutnik then. "The Russian soldiers punched the children with the rifles and beat the adults."

Szkutnik de Cabrero's aunt, who lived next door, protested that she would rather die than leave her country.

" `We can take care of that,' the soldiers said and then shot her on the spot in front of all us," recalled Szkutnik. Less than half the people crammed into Szkutnik's wooden boxcar survived the trip to the Soviet border, where they were forced to change trains for the journey to Siberia.

"I remember wishing that we all could have died," she said. "I hated to see my mother cry."

Just about every family lost relatives. Sawko's youngest brother was born in Siberia but died of malnutrition a year later. Piezcko's father died in prison in Siberia, and Piezcko and his brother were separated from their mother, who had to remain with a younger brother who was ill in Kazakstan. Piezkco did not see her again until 1960.

Szkutnik lost two sisters. One died two days after becoming lost in the Siberian woods overnight while picking raspberries. Another sister made it out of Soviet Union, but died of malnutrition in Szkutnik's arms in a temporary refugee camp in Iran where the refugees stayed before being sent to Mexico.

"She was just a bone," Szkutnik said.

But the Soviet occupation of northern Iran made the situation unsafe, and the Poles were evacuated to cooperating countries.

The Mexico-bound Poles traveled on U.S. troop ships that skirted German U-boats and enemy submarines.

Szkutnik broke off her sad story to greet Stella Kaciuba, 69, a Santa Rosa refugee who now lives in Westchester.

"We haven't seen each other in 50 years," laughed Kaciuba, as the two conversed in Polish, Spanish and a little bit of English.

"We in Santa Rosa were like family," said Kaciuba, who worked with her husband at his Chicago gas station and raised four children.

Szkutnik de Cabrera remembers how she and her family ate dogs they found in the woods. She remembers being forced to dig her sister's grave with sticks, digging deep into the Siberian soil so roaming wolves would not unearth the body.

Santa Rosa is now a private orphanage run by Salesian priests for Mexican children. Some of the former refugees, including Sawko, are helping support the children who live there. After all, Santa Rosa was the place he first learned to ride a bike.

In halting words Sawko repeated the three words of Spanish he still remembered: